1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to ail enhanced surface-emitting photonic device and, more particularly, to an enhanced surface-emitting photonic device including a structure disposed therein to enhance a performance thereof.
2. Description of the Background
Conventional compact and low-threshold lasers play an important role for pushing integrated optics towards series-production readiness and generally incorporate distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). An important drawback of DBRs, however, is that a feedback region thereof is spatially separated from the gain region. As a result, the devices are relatively large.
Another approach in conventional lasers is the use of distributed feedback (DFB) structures. Here, the gain region is incorporated into the feedback region. The main drawback of DFB, however, is that the lasing mode is provided at edges of the devices where the corresponding laser exits a resonator as a loss. The presence of this loss in these devices leads to a high lasing threshold thereof.
In either case, conventional lasing concepts have been generally implemented as linear gratings. An important drawback of linear gratings, however, is that the laser light is outcoupled in a fan-like manner, which may not be beneficial for most applications (e.g., fiber coupling).